The invention relates generally to computers and, more particularly, to a system and method to extend Web content tools to network administrative services.
A very popular Web (Internet) content tool, or protocol, is WebDAV. WebDAV stands for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is currently being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Simply stated, the WebDAV protocol makes the Web a collaborative, writeable medium. Today the Web is really read-only, where people mostly download information. WebDAV makes it possible for web users wherever they are, whether separated by two houses or two continents, to write, edit and save shared documents without scuttling each other's work, regardless of which software program or Internet service they are using.
But, WebDAV goes beyond just Web page authoring. When you look under the hood, WebDAV is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is the standard protocol that allows Web browsers to talk to Web servers. WebDAV and HTTP can accommodate all kinds of content, and so WebDAV can be used just as easily to collaboratively work on a word processing document, a spreadsheet, or an image file. Anything you can store in a file can potentially be authored using WebDAV, gaining its advantages.
WebDAV has three main features: overwrite prevention, properties, and namespace management. Overwrite prevention is critical because it allows people to avoid the “lost update problem” that occurs as changes to a document are lost when several authors access and attempt to edit a file at the same time. By ensuring that people can work together without losing their changes, overwrite prevention is the key to WebDAV's collaboration support.
WebDAV's properties feature is an efficient means of storing and retrieving what is known as “metadata”—information about a web document such as the author's name, copyright, publication date and keywords that Internet search engines use to find and retrieve relevant documents. Finally, WebDAV also has what's called “namespace management” capabilities, which enables users to conveniently manage Internet files and directories, including the ability to move and copy files. The process is similar to the way word-processing files and directories are managed on a regular computer.
In regards to network administration tools, several tool sets exist on the market today. Among those tool sets, the most widely used product on the market is Novell Directory Services by Novell, Inc. However, other tool sets such as Active Directory by Microsoft based and others based on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol also exist.
Novell Directory Services (NDS) is a portfolio of network administrative tools and a product of Novell, Inc. Novell Directory Services, often referred to as a full service directory, is a general-purpose database that manages discovery, security, storage, and relationships.
Discovery enables you to browse, search, and retrieve specific information from the directory. For example, you can search for specific object types, such as, users, printers, and application objects, or search their specific properties such as users name, phone number, address, network number and so on. Discovery must support the industry standard access methods, for example, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) protocol.
Security controls access to the all the information that is stored in the directory. This means that you can establish rules and grant rights to the users for the information in the directory. In addition, you can control the flow of information within your company, across networks of partners, and even your customers. Using the full service directory, you can manage the electronic transactions between companies through the cryptographic and key management systems. More specifically, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) available in NDS today provides security for Internet data integrity and privacy across public networks. It includes both public-key cryptography and digital certificates for checking the authenticity of keys used in a public session.
Storage is the database structure for the directory. It gives you the basic ability to save information in the database for future reference. The database is indexed, cached, and guarded from data corruption by a transaction system. Besides merely storing data, the database allows you to automatically control the type of data by applying classifications to the data structures. The classifications are flexible and extensible to provide future representations in the database. The database can be split into physical pieces and distributed or placed on multiple servers. These features enable you keep a portion of the data close to the users and resource that need them and make multiple copies of the data for redundancy.
Relationship is the ability to build associations between the people, network devices, network applications, and information on the network. For example, instead of storing the user's profile information on the local machine, it can be stored in NDS. The result is that the profile information becomes global within the scope of the directory and the user can access the profile information from anywhere. This means that the user receives the same profile regardless of where he attaches and logs in to the network. In addition, the access to the profile information is tightly controlled. The only user that can gain access is the one with the proper credentials. Thus, the integrity of profile information is protected and secure, and the user can access it globally-easily.
The other network administration tool sets have similar features. Although the combination of a network administration tool set and the WebDAV protocol would provide access to network directory structure through a platform independent architecture, no real combination exists today. If a combination existed, any operating system that has a WebDAV enabled web browser can have access to the network administration functions.
Therefore, what is needed is an invention that combines both a network administration portfolio with the WebDAV protocol.